Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“A horse has steel hooves. A cat has a steel ego, assuming you’re referring to Miss Temple’s Midnight Louie.”

“Why’d you force the issue with Dirty Larry? Bring him in?”

“Because my legs were getting damned tired of following him around shadowing you. You knew when you asked me to watch him he was up to something.”

“I asked you to watch Rafi Nadir, too.”

“Not to knock your taste in men then and now, but Nadir is truly not as interesting as Dirty Larry. In a criminal sense.”

“You think Podesta is criminal?”

“No more so than this Crawford Buchanan character I heard you talking about.”

“And you’re going on … what? With legs that threaten to capsize you and a memory made of cheesecloth?”

“Instinct. That’s why I’m still here, and why you still want me.” He made a deprecatory gesture before she could jump on his phrasing. “Alch won’t cut it anymore. You need someone more ruthless, without a life and a career to ruin. Your conscience wouldn’t allow that. Enter moi, just in time. We didn’t get along, did we?”

Molina couldn’t stop a low, confirming chuckle. “An understatement.”

“You made a mistake about me, yes? So now you need me to vet and uncover your current mistakes.”

“Simple job. I wanted a discreet report on a couple guys normally not objects of professional police interest. I may have a personnel problem, but you’ve got personal problems, too.”

“There’s nothing personal in my life, or my memory. Except … Garry Randolph.”

“Are you sure? I bet you’re finding that you like Temple Barr a lot more than you thought you would.”

“That’s odd about what I remember. I do recall my druthers.”

“And?”

“Not my type.”

“What is?”

His smile was reminiscent. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

“You already did,” Molina surmised. “Men. God, you’re like Stephen Hawking, committing infidelity from a wheelchair.”

“As I understand it from the lady in question, and her very-present fiancé, I was and am free to commit whatsoever I choose with anyone of my choice.”

“I’m sure women the world over rejoice. Back on topic, why the hell did you out Dirty Larry? I just wanted him followed, not confronted. You put him on notice.”

“When a guy is Johnny-on-the-spot for a murder scene one night and skulking outside the investigating officer’s the next, he should be put on notice. That’s when mistakes get made. Also, I overheard the byplay about your underage daughter. I get why you went supernova when she disappeared. You want me to investigate that Crawford creep, too? If Temple loathes him, he must be scummy.”

“You’re doing too much as it is.” She rose to collect the empty bottle from his hand and weighed it to match her mental processes.

Max Kinsella waited.

“Anything else you want me to tell you?” she asked finally.

“Anything and everything about Larry Podesta, from the moment he showed up, and your stalker, and the Barbie doll killings.”

“That’s very restricted personal and professional territory.” She dropped her hand with the beer bottle, moving from hostess to challenger.

“That’s the beauty of it. I have no restrictions. I’ve got a totally fresh outlook on the facts. I’m not emotionally attached to anyone involved, and I find the whole sequence of events I’ve heard so far seriously troublesome.”

Molina considered. “I suppose you’d take another beer. I can’t interest you in a cushy chair?”

“Beer is fine, but I need to stay as close to vertical as I can be these days.”

“Most pricks do,” she tossed behind her back as she went for the fridge, walking straight into and out through the probably unintended implication.

She slammed two fresh beer bottles on the breakfast countertop and took an opposing stool.

“What did I ever do,” he asked, “to make you an enemy?”

“Left town before I could interrogate you.”

“Interrogate me.” He opened his hands to prove he had nothing to hide.

“Too late. I guess I’ll have to let you interrogate me.”

“Okay. Dirty Larry. I already know you never trusted him. As you don’t trust me now that I’m playing the same role for you—undercover investigator. The only man you really trust is Detective Alch.”

“True enough. As you only trusted Garry Randolph.”

“After what he did for me through the years, just the past two months of this year…”

Molina turned the now-damp beer bottle in her hands. Her palms had already gone sweaty with career memories. Losses. Cops would die for each other, but civilians weren’t obliged to. She wished she’d met “Gandolph the Great.” Her sympathy for Kinsella’s unfading grief at losing him made her respect both men.

Temple Barr had believed to that terrier-tough core of hers that Max Kinsella was a “good guy.” Still to be proven to Molina. And now she was about to do what she’d never done with Dirty Larry. Tell Kinsella her secrets. Admit that she’d been so obsessed with him as a cop she’d believed he could be obsessed with her as a woman. As Mariah would moan in her melodramatic teen way, “Tres embarrassing, mo-ther!”

“All the chalk has been wiped away,” Kinsella said to get her started. “It’s that old cliché, a fresh slate. Maybe now I am the murderer you always thought I was, by default.”

“Quit whining. That was never in your jacket. Randolph’s shooting was the universe’s fault. We’ve all screwed up. Whatever was wrong about my assumptions these past two years, about you or Temple Barr or Dirty Larry or my stalker or my daughter—or my ex—is my fault. My watch.”

“Okay.” She saw her hands—large, strong, plain—clutching the thick bottom of the beer bottle. “I decided to ‘use’ Dirty Larry as an off-the-books investigator because I couldn’t find you. I knew Temple was seeing you regularly, that you were out there. When Larry did it, when he tracked you to your hidey-hole, your house on Mojave, it happened to be just after your Phantom Mage persona had crashed and burned at the Neon Nightmare club. Randolph must have been an even better magician than you.”

Kinsella just nodded. She had to credit him with being a good listener.

“Getting you out of the Neon Nightmare wall-banging scene as a DOA, and then, presto, you never got to a hospital on the other end—I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t know about that incident when Podesta followed you home from a rendezvous with Barr and got an actual, genuine street address for you.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I didn’t trust anybody. I went over myself.”

“The house is equipped with embassy-level security,” he said. “It almost managed to spit me out when I returned.”

“I had to do a B and E.”

“Illegal.”

“Naturally.”

Kinsella lifted his beer bottle. “I like your style. Hard on a police career, though.”

“Even harder on me was the stalker inside.”

“Already there?”

“Maybe. The biggest butcher knife was missing from the kitchen block when I went through the back. One of those now-you-see-it, later you-really-“see”-it, bite-you-back situations.”

Kinsella gave a rueful grimace. “I hate it when your instincts are ahead of your brain.”

“I heard someone else there not much later and ducked into the hall closet.”

“Not the greatest cover. Shallow. Louvered wooden doors like toothpicks. Not much in there, but not much protection either.”

“I didn’t know the house. Then I … heard what I later knew to be the sound of a knife shredding someone’s wardrobe. Yours. It sounded like a big cat on a rampage.”