Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

“No. I remember running a search already. Are the police on your tail for this call girl death?”

“Yes … and no, I think. Remember Molina?”

“Sure. Good cop.”

“Well, she was one of those who advised me to take the call-girl route.”

“No kidding. She must be sweating it now.”

“She won’t let me get away with murder if she thinks I did it, no matter what.”

“I know. Good cop. Got a few hang-ups too, but, hey, it’s what makes us all interesting. So … you join the mile-high club with that call girl?”

“Mile-high—?”

“Those Las Vegas megahotels are said to be halfway to heaven.”

“Frank.”

“I know. None of my business. You do see, though, don’t you? If you hadn’t made a fetish out of chastity, if you’d failed like a billion men and a few thousand priests before you, you wouldn’t be in this mess. You wouldn’t have had anything to lose.”

“You really believe that now?”

“Yeah. For women and for men. It’s a form of control, don’t you see, Matt? And no one can control you if you can control yourself.”

The paradox had Matt’s head spinning.

It was trying to control himself that had gotten him into this out-of-control situation, after all.

“You’re reasoning like a Jesuit,” he complained.

“Come to think of it, being an FBI agent is a little like that. Anything else I can help with?”

Matt shook his head, then realized he was on the phone and needed to say something.

“No. Not for now. Just find out something—anythingon Kathleen O’Connor.”

Chapter 29

… Glory Days

The glossy photo Alfonso slapped down on Molina’s desk made her blink for a moment.

What did she want with a vintage photo of Dolores Del Rio?

“Fuentes,” Alfonso explained without being asked. “About forty years ago. A looker.” He pushed the highly colored portrait aside to reveal a full-length black-andwhite cheesecake shot beneath it. “Her calling card was her legs, though, not that face. She did a lot of product posing in L.A. before she ended up in Gandolph the Great’s magic act.” Another photo: gorgeous Gloria with an ordinary-looking youngish guy who was already showing a little too much chub for the camera.

“Were they friends, lovers?” Molina asked.

“Coworkers. Barrett dug up a bunch of old-time magicians. They’ve got this old folks club going at the local barbecue now. Meet every Tuesday, only we got a membership list and made some rounds. Everybody said Gandolph—real name Garry, two R’s, Randolph as in Churchill—”

“Again your easy erudition amazes me, Alfonso.”

He shrugged modestly. “I try to know things that might come in handy, and you never know what might come in handy in our line of work. Anyway, they were colleagues. Buddies. That’s all.”

“She didn’t outlive him by much,” Molina commented, moving the glamour photo front and center. The body on the autopsy table with the words “she left” scripted under her rib cage hadn’t even hinted at such past glory as this. Dish to dust.

“Now that might be funny,” Alfonso said. “Old Gandolph dead under uncertain circumstances on Halloween, his former assistant strangled to death only months later in the parking lot of a church. Odd part is, she wasn’t churchgoing, the ex-neighbors in the apartment building were sure of that. It was kind of an unofficial retirement home for ex-performers, that place: cheap, a little rundown like they were, kind of a community, though, and they kept an eye on each other.”

“Is this stuff in the original reports?”

“Some. Some Barrett and me made up.” He grinned. Molina knew he was referring to the Abies’ mysterious ways of squeezing new facts out of old cases.

If they could wring some fresh suspects from the Fuentes case files, it would create enough of a flutter in the department and the media to let Vassar die a natural death in the news.

“So how did she get to a church parking lot?” Molina asked.

“Someone was trying to look her up a few days before she died. A mysterious stranger.”

Alfonso enunciated the final phrase with relish as he sat on the plastic shell chair in front of Molina’s desk. Plastic wasn’t supposed to groan like wood under massive weight, but this chair managed at least a squawk. Maybe the steel bolts were giving.

“Any description of this mysterious stranger? Was he tall?”

“Got someone like Barrett in mind, Lieutenant?” Alfonso flipped pages and shook his head. ” ‘Fraid not. Middling kind of guy: middle-aged, middle-height, middle-weight, but dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and loose running pants, light gray, like he had come from the gym. Kept his hood on too, so he could be bald as an eagle or as hairy as Elvis on top. Wore sunglasses, so his eye color is a mystery too.”

“Just asking for her?”

“She had an unpublished number, so her address wasn’t in the phone book. He was asking for her apartment, but nobody would tell him. They look out for each other at the Iverton Arms.”

“The place sounds like a time warp.”

Alfonso nodded. “Retired performers live in the past. You should have seen the old ladies fawning over me, inviting me in for pastry and a photo-album session of their clippings from the days when they were cuties instead of Medicare patients. Not so many old guys in residence. Guess my gender isn’t in it for the long run.”

“Maybe too many cigarettes and pastries,” Molina suggested.

“Always the diplomat, Lieutenant,” Alfonso said blithely.

Three ex-wives and a series of police doctors hadn’t gotten him to change his habits or his profile in thirty years. One remark from her wasn’t going to do it now.

“That’s more than we got on Fuentes the first time around,” she noted approvingly. “You and Barrett keep on it.”

“And what about that call girl, Vassar?”

“Alch and Su are backgrounding her. It’s a little tougher. Rothenberg’s employees don’t offer the police pastry and photo albums, more like zipped lips and the bum’s rush.”

“I thought you softened her up yourself.”

“The city attorneys haven’t softened her up in fourteen-years. What makes you think I could do it?”

“I thought maybe woman to woman—”

“Sisterhood means zilch when you’re on opposite sides of the long lean line of the law, Alfonso. I just wanted to know what she thought about the death.”

“And?”

“Oddly complacent. More concerned about making a point that it was unlikely for a seasoned call girl to get hurt, or underestimate a john with designs on throwing her off an atrium railing. She’s all politics.”

“Want Barrett and me to do some digging there?”

“Higher placed minions of the law than you and me have done that for years and came up with harassment suits and ACLU press conferences. Besides, the Goliath death is iffy, at best.”

Alfonso stood, taking a stab at pulling his belt up over his ballooning belly. “If the words ‘she left’ show up on this Vassar’s corpse, though, let me know.”

“You and half the force.”

Chapter 30

All in Another Night’s

Work: Split Personality

Max was finding his new double identity, established on an impulse, quite handy.

He was back at Neon Nightmare on a crowded Friday night in his Phantom Mage persona.

Given the circus of acrobats, dancers, and magicians who performed nightly at the place’s pinnacle and then came down to earth when their gigs were over to mingle with the audience, the Phantom and his hokey half-mask fit right in.

Max knew he was like a moth drawn to flit around the fatal flame the Synth threw off, but the building was itself a maze that demanded further exploration before he could hope to penetrate to the heart of the labyrinth, the Synth and all its works, and its workers.