Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

It was Monday morning, and Kathleen O’Connor’s worm Ouroboros ring was gone. The bad news was that sometime in the recent past she had been in his rooms, had moved among .his things, perhaps even while he slept, to accomplish the sleight of hand of the missing ring. The good news was that, for the first time, he truly believed that she had given up on him.

Liberation felt uplifting, like a good confession. Like saying the Apostle’s Creed and starting a whole new day, a whole new life.

But one man’s liberation was often another’s loss. The snake had left Eden.

Where was it slithering next?

Chapter 25

… Jailhouse Hard Rock

“Okay,” Molina said, shaking the multivitamin energy drink-to-go on her desk.

Breakfast.

Everyone in the room was eating on the run, or on the meeting break: Alfonso, Barrett, Su, and Alch.

Alfonso had a McDonald’s cholesterol special on his lap, sausage and cheese predominating. Barrett munched a sports nutrition bar. Su had coffee from the Office Urn of All Sediment and an Almond Joy candy bar. Alch, he went for a Weight Watchers bar, munching in time with Barrett.

Molina eyed her troops, aware how their very differences, physical and psychological, made them good partners. Too good for this case that cut so close to her own bones. Yet she had to do her job. Or seem to.

“I saw Rothenberg,” Molina announced. “Vassar was her girl, and Rothenberg believes that her girls are too mentally, physically, and socially healthy to off themselves, or to get offed. She won’t be yelling police incompetence if we just bury this investigation. Case closed?”

“No way,” Su mumbled through three hundred luscious calories that would not put an ounce on her tensile little frame, Molina reflected. “A call girl dies. Chances are ninety-to-one it’s murder.”

“No evidence,” Alfonso countered.

Molina took a deep breath. It was now or never. Do her job or save her rear.

“I don’t like that bellman with Alzheimer’s,” she said. “The kind of tips they get for playing matchmaker, I don’t believe he never noticed a thing.”

“Lots of that sort of traffic at a big place like the Goliath,” Su said. “I doubt those women even remember the faces they saw the night before, and they get paid plenty.”

“What do you suggest?” Alch asked Molina. Morrie always recognized when she was leading a horse to water.

“Bring the bellman in. Sweat him. Let me know when you’re ready.”

Alch nodded.

Barrett spoke up. “Whatever the bellman says, there’s not a mark on her that wasn’t caused by hitting neon at eighty miles an hour. Some bruises, a lot of internal damage. She could have dived. But Rothenberg has a political stake in representing hooking as safe and sane.”

Molina nodded, waiting for their respective partners to bow in.

“It’s not good PR,” Alch offered, trying not to look lustily at Su’s half-eaten candy bar. “A dead call girl when you’re a national spokeswoman for hookers’ rights to choose? Rothenberg might know more. Maybe somebody was moving in on her operation. It’s pretty passkey. The girls are gung-ho about wanting to do what they do. An old-school pimp would be a wolf among sheep.”

“Interesting,” Molina agreed. “Rothenberg’s bled the local media for all the feature stories she can get. She might be ripe for plucking, and her girls too. Vassar might have been approached first to change handlers.”

“What if she went for the idea?” Su asked, sitting forward on a chair she already perched on like a sparrow.“What if she’d been recruited by someone else, and Rothenberg saw her libertarian utopia looking shaky? Would she kill to defend it?”

“Even more interesting,” Molina granted. “And then there’s the string of deaths of near-apparent women of the night. You know which ones I mean?”

“Yeah.” Alch burped. That Weight Watchers bar must have been heavy consumption for him. He shrugged apology, but was too jived on his idea to blush for his social sins. “First there was that woman’s body dumped at the Blue Dahlia parking lot. ‘She left,’ was painted on the neighboring car. Yours, as I recall, Lieutenant.”

“You don’t have to remind me, Morrie.”

“Right. Anyway, Su and I solved that one. Some weirdo had killed her for not being a shady lady, can you believe it?” he asked Alfonso and Barrett.

“And there was that young stripper, Cher Smith,” Su put in. She was competitive with her elder, Alch, even though, or especially because, they were partners. “We lucked out when her killer tried to attack a strip-club costume-seller who was armed with pepper spray.”

“Right,” Molina said too quickly.

The less anyone dwelled on that recent episode the better she’d feel personally. The fact was that a mere civilian had lured and trapped the killer, pathetic as the murderer had turned out to be.

“We’ve still got one outstanding,” Su noted unhappily, folding her candy bar wrapper into very tight, neat origami.

Buddha bless overachieving third-generation Asian-Americans, Molina thought.

“That’s the broad,” Alfonso said, Egg McMuffin sticking to his teeth, “they found in the church parking lot about the same time as the Blue Dahlia dame.”

God bless old-time cops of whatever ethnic heritage who never let go.

“Gloria Fuentes,” Barrett added with narrowed eyes, “was no shady lady. She was a retired magician’s assistant. Sure, they’re all legs and cleavage, but this lady was over the hill, pardon me. She’d been out of the performance game for years. Hell, her main magician, Gandolph the Great, had quit performing to sniff out fake mediums years ago. She was no spring chicken, and she died in a church parking lot, for Gawd’s sake, not in the parking lot of a trendy restaurant-nightclub like the Blue Dahlia, pardon me, Lieutenant, for your patronage.”

“The Blue Dahlia hasn’t had any crime calls except that one,” Molina noted.

“But that was a doozy. Murder One,” Barrett chortled. Yes, chortled. Molina turned to Alch, whose insight she could always depend upon.

“ ‘She left,’ ” he intoned. “That was the phrase painted near the body in the Blue Dahlia parking lot, and that was the phrase that appeared during the autopsy of Gloria Fuentes’s body, like invisible ink finally showing up. I think those murders were connected.”

“We nailed the Blue Dahlia perp,” Su objected, pulling a second Almond Joy from the pocket of her size-zero navy silk jacket.

Alch’s salt-and-pepper head shook doggedly, like a wet Old English sheepdog’s. “I think they were connected, all right, but not necessarily by the same killer.”

All jaws stopped munching.

This was a radical suggestion.

Molina bowed her head, or maybe merely nodded, at Alch.

Encouraged, he went on. “Maybe it was a copycat killing. I mean, there we have it, in the Blue Dahlia lot, the phrase ‘She left.’ How basic can you get? Every woman who’s involved with an abusive man, what is her death all about? She left, he got homicidal. It’s predictable.”

“We’ve never found a suspect for the Fuentes case,” Molina pointed out.

“But,” said Alch, perching on the edge of his chair a lot more uncomfortably but no less eagerly than Su had on hers, “the same words turn up relative to Fuentes after the body’s in our custody. She left. Same old overcontrollingbastard’s complaint, only someone got into our system, into the morgue, mind you, to send that message. What did Gloria Fuentes leave? Anybody know? Anybody look into that?”

“Lived alone, past sixty,” Su said.

“You’re young,” Alch returned. “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have had a man in her life.”