Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

Rothenberg nodded.

Molina suddenly realized that her fears were not valid. Rothenberg would not cry murder, because everything was invested in her belief that sex for sale could be safe and civilized.

“Frankly,” Molina went on, “the evidence is pretty overwhelming that no foul play was involved. There isn’t an inappropriate mark on the body that couldn’t be explained by a fall. The Goliath is the only Vegas hotel that has that dangerous central atrium design. She would have had to be leaning over the edge, but that neon ceiling is pretty fascinating from above. Still, I find it hard to believe that the woman was simply admiring the view and plunged to her death.”

“We’ve never had an untoward incident at the Goliath,” Rothenberg said. “Admit it, Lieutenant. Accidents can happen. Even to sex companions.”

Molina allowed the sick, troubled feeling that had taken up residence on her insides to show on the outside. Judith Rothenberg took it for officialdom hating to admit that Vassar’s chosen line of work was healthy, safe, and subject to ordinary worker accidents now and again.

“I won’t let you sensationalize Vassar’s death to make a moral point,” Rothenberg added more sternly. “I won’t let you use her to undermine everything she believed in, including herself.”

So now the police were the stigmatizing villains, Molina thought.

Amazing how circumstances and everyone she talked to were making it so easy for her to hide the embarrassing truth and save her own and Matt Devine’s skin.

As a mother and the woman who had advised Devine to take the course that had ended in Vassar’s death, she knew massive relief. He would be safe. She would be safe. Mariah’s future would be safe.

As a cop, she was seriously unhappy. It had been too easy to bury this fatal “mistake” to be honest or true or decent.

Her job was to do something about that, even if it hurt.

Chapter 12

All in a Night’s Work:

The Midnight Hour .. .

Only one other person besides Molina knew the why and wherefore of Matt’s desperate rendezvous with a call girl, and she was on the air solid from 7:00 to 11:58 P.M.

Matt called her at four in the afternoon, and they agreed to meet at the black bar named Buff Daddy’s, one place Kathleen O’Connor couldn’t slip into without standing out like a hitchhiking Caucasian thumb.

Matt, being anxious, got there first. The repainted Probe was the only white car in the parking lot, he noted, anticipating his entry into the club.

There were many ways one could feel an outsider. Being a priest had been one. Being an ex-priest had, surprisingly, been another. Being the only one of your race in a particular place was more external, even more obvious and alienating.

Matt just strolled in, checked to see that Ambrosia’s far table was empty, and made for it without much looking around.

He sensed no hostility, just curiosity. Curiosity only killed cats, and the last time Matt had looked he’d had no fur or a tail.

He sat down and, when the dreadlocked bar girl came by about seven minutes later, ordered a beer and a Bloody Mary for Ambrosia.

The drinks arrived much faster than the server had, and the regally red Bloody Mary seemed to make a good standin for Ambrosia. The chatter and buzz in the place returned to its customary pitch, while Matt waited for the absent queen of the airwaves.

Ambrosia rolled in like coastal fog fifteen minutes later, swift and casting a giant shadow.

Matt watched her approach, never having seen her at a distance before, but only in the claustrophobic halls and cubby-hole offices and studios of the radio station where they worked.

She walked with the little cat feet of Carl Sandburg’s metaphoric fog, lithe and sure despite her three hundred pounds. Her bright knit tunic and pants rippled like tribal ceremonial robes. She was a lot younger and heavier and darker, but reminded him of the late sculptor Louise Nevelson, who had dressed like a living totem to some indeterminately ancient ethnic culture and who thereby went beyond that to utter individuality.

For the first time since he had awakened that morning, Matt felt a thread of hope pulling his leaden spirit upward.

Leticia Brown, aka Ambrosia on the radio, spied the Bloody Mary before she did him, and beamed.

“Is that stalk of vodka-soaked celery for me, or are you just happy to see me?” she quipped in Mae West’s deep breathy tones.

“All yours.”

She eyed the long-neck in front of him as she sat. “Men and beer. It’s some tribal thing.”

“It says we’re hoping to stay sober, for the air in my case.”

“Son, you got miles to go before Mr. Mike makes you sit up and pay attention.”

“I know. I thought I’d tag along for your stint.”

“I enjoy a live audience as much as the next radio voice, but Matt, honey, you got five hours to kill after we get there.”

“I know. I’d like to kill a lot more hours.” When she only sipped her drink in answer, he added. “I’d like to kill all of last night, rewind it, and erase it, only that last verb is grimly apt.”

“Last night! That’s right! Did you do the dirty deed?”

Ambrosia sipped the Bloody Mary through a straw, her perfectly made-up face puckered into the innocent insouciance of a fifties teen at a soda fountain.

“Did I do the dirty deed? Lieutenant Molina seems to think I did.”

“Lieutenant? We talking poe-lice here?”

Matt nodded. “Everything went horribly wrong.”

“When doesn’t it, baby?”

He could only huff out a half-laugh and sip his beer. It tasted flat already, but he guessed that everything would for a long time.

“Let’s go back to square one,” Ambrosia declared. She was definite about everything, and that was what Matt needed now.

He nodded permission for her to direct this off-mike session of theirs. She wiggled a little as she settled into the wooden captain’s chair.

“So you did what we decided was the only way out. If a stalker wants your cherry, you give him—her, in your case—used goods. Used goods. Virginity. That whole notion is such retro-think! You read about that poor girl in Pakistan, where her eleven-year-old brother violated some tribal rule by walking with a girl from another neighborhood, and the dudes in the tribunal decided the only way to make it right was to gang-rape the little boy’s teenage sister, and they did it personally while hundreds of villagers stood outside and laughed? That is so not-human. I do not want to share the planet with such scum. Bunch of dirty old men panting after some young girl and coming up with fairy tales about ‘honor’ to make it happen. Sometimes I hate men. Just the gender. Every last one. I do. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“It’s a woman who’s hounding me.”

“Un-natch-u-ral woman. That’s who she is. Acting like a man. Like she needs to own people. I’m sorry, Matt. Sometimes I get so mad. You’re not like that scum.”

“I suppose any of us could be like them. If we didn’t have the capacity for evil, being and doing good wouldn’t be worth as much.”

“Don’t give me that theology. I don’t want to see any evil in the world. No devils. And that witchy woman stalking you is a devil. Riding in on her motorcycle, snatching the necklace right off my neck and waving it around like a scalp before she roared off … one unnatural woman. And she don’t even come from some crazy primitive land, you say.”

“Only Ireland, and that is a crazy, primitive land in its own way.”

Ambrosia nodded, and directed the last part of it at the waiter. Her Bloody Mary was a thin, watery pink in the bottom of the tall glass.

She sighed. “Ireland and Israel. Strange, besieged lands. You’d like to like those feisty people, much sinned against, but sometimes they’re so stubborn you could strangle them. We were sinned against,” she added contemplatively, the first time Matt had ever heard her refer to her race, “but we danced and sang and marched our way out of it, as much as we ever could.”