Unknown: 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

Okay. This was official. Then he didn’t have to go out of his way to be a friendly neighborhood snitch. “Is this about Kinsella?”

“Screw Kinsella!” She didn’t shout. She spoke in a low, intense tone that was much worse. Carmen, using casual language? The never-part-time mother who didn’t want her preteen daughter growing up anything but a good girl? “I don’t give a flying … fig … for that lowlife at the moment, count my blessings.”

She had pronounced “fig” with such intense articulation that Matt thought the obscenity it stood in for at the last moment would have been less harsh.

“I’m sorry,” he said, spreading his hands, the classic gesture of the poor soul who was without a clue. “Something very bad has obviously happened—”

“Where were you last night?”

“Ah, not at work. I had the night off.”

“So where were you?”

So this was about him, not Max Kinsella. Matt tried to shift his mind and emotions 180 degrees.

“Don’t rehearse an answer,” she pushed. “Just tell me.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I’m the police!”

“If this is an official interrogation, then there might be reasons why I shouldn’t ‘just tell you.’ Do I need a lawyer?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out. This is off the record. You could tell me you offed Jimmy Hoffa and I wouldn’t have a shred of evidence.”

“Unless you were wired.” Matt eyed her encompassing outfit with a certain wariness.

She paced again for a few seconds, then stopped front and center. “Look. I’m trying to help you. I tried to helpyou before, remember? I don’t need evasions now. I need the absolute truth. Where were you last night?”

“Truth is never absolute,” he began.

“Enough with the hair-splitting. You want to search me?” She stopped again, spread her arms.

“Good Lord, no.” The idea was completely alarming. “I just don’t understand … I’m still half asleep. You’ve completely changed. I don’t get it.”

“I’m not wired. Just being here is putting my career on the line. I’m trying to help you … yes, and me too. I need the truth. I need to know. Where were you last night?”

“Doing what you told me to do.”

“Oh, God.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Where were you doing it?”

“At the Goliath Hotel.”

Her breath came out in a huff. And then all her tensile energy sifted away like flour into a bowl. She sat on one of his gray cube tables. “Take me through it, step by step.”

“It’s kind of personal.”

“No, Matt. It isn’t.”

She nailed him with her police look, with the one personal attribute that was utterly riveting, her Blue-Hawaiiintense eyes. How did a Latina woman come by that Anglo-Saxon imprimatur? He guessed he’d never know.

“I did exactly as you said,” he began, fascinated that the statement made her wince. “I burned and dodged all up and down the Strip to lose any tail. To lose Kathleen O’Connor, the bane of my existence, the woman who wants my supposed virtue.”

“What do you mean ‘supposed’?”

“Only that chastity isn’t a much-valued commodity anywhere but in the Church, and even there nowadays it’s proved to be a pretty tawdry concept, sometimes a matter more of hypocrisy than dogma.”

“So you shouldn’t feel so bad about having to ‘lose’ it to save everybody you know from a vengeful stalker.”

“I shouldn’t, but I do. Think Mariah.”

She looked away, as if her hard-nosed act had cracked a little, maybe a lot.

“Believe me,” she said, “I don’t want to eavesdrop on your psycho-social-sexual-spiritual struggles. I just need to know where you went, and what you did. And when.”

“I got to the Goliath about … before seven. It was still light. I didn’t check the time. I had the night off, didn’t I?”

“Boys night out,” she murmured.

“I did everything you said. Took a room with cash. Changed at the last minute as if I were a superstitious gambler worried about the number. Tipped the bellman a hundred bucks for my lowly single bag.” Matt decided not to mention splurging on expensive new clothes for the occasion; it made him sound like a total hick. “Asked if he knew some entertaining young ladies.”

“And—?”

“Worked like a charm, Lieutenant. You sure know Las Vegas. Within ninety minutes there was this vision in my doorway. She was everything you said. Beautiful. Sophisticated. Smart. Dressed like a movie star at the Oscars. Downtrodden? Hardly. She was willing to hit the tables, but settled for dinner in the room. She ordered, knowing the hotel menu, and it was as expensive as she was.”

“Good dinner?”

“Best I ever had.”

The interrogation had become a bitter point/counterpoint, each side elaborately not quite acknowledging a certain collaboration.

They were in this together, Matt thought with a queasy feeling, as much as he and Vassar had ever been. A tacit accommodation.

“And—?”

“We talked.”

“Oh, come on.”

“We did. You were right. She was a total professional. Proud of her role in the sex industry. No way was I goingto ‘exploit’ her. Why do you need to know all this? You want to arrest the poor woman?”

“If only I could.”

“Well, I’m glad she’s out of your jurisdiction, then. She really was terribly bright. I’m politically incorrect enough to feel she could have had a better job, didn’t have to be doing what she was doing, but she was having none of that. I was insulting her to question her profession. And myself.”

“Did you explain your particular situation?”

“Yeah. She was fascinated. Liked the idea of being the one to ‘minister’ to such a newbie. Acted like a shrink. Freaked me out.”

“So—?”

“Isn’t there a name for this, Lieutenant? Prying into other people’s intimate affairs?”

“Yeah. It’s called ‘need to know.’ Trust me. I don’t like this any better than you do. Cut to the chase. You ate, you talked, you took care of business, and then what?”

“I left. Left fifteen hundred-dollar bills on the marble shelf in the bathroom, fifteen feet long. The shelf, not the fifteen hundred-dollar bills. I was worried about underpaying, so I probably went overboard. Could have saved four or five hundred maybe. What do you think?”

“Don’t sound so bitter. It doesn’t become you. What time was it?”

“Too late? Oops. Bitter again. I don’t know. I deliberately didn’t wear a watch. Didn’t want to know what time the cock crowed. I went out through the casino to the Strip. It was still dark, but a stiletto of light outlined the mountains in the east. It made me think of those thin tall heels she wore, and the snakeskin thongs that held them on.”

“Snakeskin stilettos. Tools of the trade.”

“Yeah. She was a lovely girl. Bright. Beautiful. Vassar-educated. Cultured. Victim of date rape. You see, Lieutenant, dig deep enough, even with a seasoned, fully cognizant pro, and you find a wound, maybe even if you just made it yourself.”

“Was?” Molina asked.

The way she said it, the accusing, probing way she said it, made Matt catch his breath.

For the first time, he feared for something more concrete than his soul.

Chapter 3

Cat Haven

I am lying on my back with my pins reaching for the sky, or ceiling. I am not surrendering, but airing out my underside.

I have commandeered the bottom half of the bed on a forty-five degree angle. This way I am able to stretch out to my full three feet toe-to-tail without touching a hair to anything solid except the zebra-striped comforter I recline upon.

There is no more blissful position in this world, especially when it is accompanied by the knowledge that my resident human, Miss Temple Barr, is curled up like a snail in what is left of her portion of the bed. She is so cute when she is sleeping in such a way as to accommodate yours truly. That is when I realize why I have deigned to share my life, my fortune, and my sacred self-sufficiency with her.