Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

She could relax and (almost) be herself because tonight she knew where Rafi Nadir was: being tailed by a plainclothes officer who had reported him across town at another strip club. Purely a customer now, not a bouncer.

She glimpsed her curdled expression in the mirror, as if she was drinking a whiskey sour.

Didn’t want to think about why a man she had used to know hung out at strip clubs. Know? “A fellow officer” was the now-inoperative phrase. Another phrase followed, one even more painful to roll around in her head like ice in an empty lowball glass: an ex-significant other.

Barry unglued himself and his wad from the bevy of off-duty strippers and lurched to Molina’s station at the bar.

“Hey, casting director lady!” he greeted her with feigned quasi-drunken camaraderie.

“Location scout,” she corrected him for whatever public they played to during even the most private conversation.

“Whatever, babe.” He grinned. Barry Reichert enjoyed getting into a persona where he could play fast and loose with a ranking female homicide officer. That was almost living as dangerously as risking his sanity and life among the crystal meth set.

Barry was an unstriking brown/brown: hazel-eyed, dishwater brown-haired, middle-American guy with scraggly coif, a five o’clock shadow aiming for midnight blue and missing by several shades, and scruffy casual clothes.

Like all undercover officers, he absorbed his role. He was “in character” night and day, even when a slice of reality stabbed through on the knife of a cutting remark.

Despite his apparent shaggy geniality, Barry reminded her of that walking immaculate deception, Max Kinsella.

Molina tried not to let her distaste show. She was playing at undercover work now herself, and it was entirely different from anything she had done in police work before except for a brief, early stint as john-bait in East L.A.

“Come on,” Reichert was cajoling, maybe only half kidding in his womanizing role, “you could use a guy like me, admit it.”

“Using is one thing; liking it is another.”

“Ooooouch!” He shook a mock burned hand. “I’d be great on camera.”

By now everyone at the bar had lost interest in their interchange.

Barry leaned so close she could smell his motor-oil cologne. “You getting any info?”

“A little. And you?”

He lifted her almost empty glass and sucked the remaining water and the ice filling it. “The girls are spooked.” He spoke so softly that he might have been whistling Dixie through his teeth. “These parking lot attacks are getting to them.”

Molina nodded. Strippers weren’t dumb. They saw the axe from the first. “You see that man I mentioned?”

Reichert’s shaggy yeti-like head shook. “No really tall guy like that here. You ever notice that guys who patronize strip clubs tend to be short? No? True. Must be compensation. For the height of what, I won’t say.” Grin. “As far as tall guys go, not even an Elvis in disguise either. Were you serious about that?”

“I’m always serious, Reichert.”

He grinned as if she had issued him a challenge. “So I heard. The Iron Maiden Lady of Homicide.”

She didn’t react. Stoicism was the best defense. “Believe it. I don’t care how much you’re enjoying a break from the speed freaks, Reichert, I’m after a killer here, maybe a serial killer. He won’t play the part, like you do, but he’ll mean business. So you keep at it. I’m sure those bills are burning a hole in your…pocket. Enjoy.”

She pushed off the bar and headed for the door. Halfway there a drunken topless stripper collided with her.

“Hey, who was that lady! Whatcha doin’ here?”

“I’m a location scout.”

“Location scout?”

“For a TV show.”

“Oh, a TV show. C’mon, you gotta be in the picture.”

“No.” Molina pulled her arm away.

“We’re all having our picture taken. It’s Wendy’s birthday. C’mon.”

Molina didn’t have to “c’mon.” A bunch of strippers surrounded her, hanging off her shoulders and making her part of a topless chorus line.

“That’s it, ladies,” a guy shouted over the noise,“get closer now. Smile.” The photographer backed up to include the whole impromptu row, the camera’s long telephoto lens obscenely erect given the atmosphere.

Molina ducked her head, let the false hair fall forward over her face just as the camera flashed.

“Sorry, ladies, I’m outa here.” She pulled away, the drunken one clinging.

“It’s my birthday,” she slurred,“you gotta say ‘Happy Birthday’.”

“Happy Birthday Suit,” Molina muttered, making for the door.

She wasn’t happy about being in a photo. These pro-am shutter bugs always haunted strip clubs, selling prints to regulars and the girls themselves, cataloguing offstage life and likely illegal activities.

The whole scene had a stench that was almost smothering. She crashed through the door to the outside, suddenly understanding what prisoners must feel on release.

Air. Black night. Bright constellations falling to the ground, like angels, and becoming neon signs. Another night on Paradise. On Paradise Avenue in Las Vegas, a long, straight row of strip clubs magnified to infinity.

When you thought about the endless numbers of women who found a tawdry glamour and even self-esteem in flashing nudity at men, and the families they came from that made this strip-club life seem a far, far better thing than they had ever done…. Molina shook her head, though no one was there to see it.

In another moment she herself didn’t see the gaudy neon tracks of signs narrowing into the distance like lonesome train rails. Her mind was back in the Valley Hospital room, watching a girl who called herself Gayla lying pale and lost in some monotone film nightmare produced by that low-budget pair of mind-numbers: pain and pain killers.

The injuries from the attack Molina had almost witnessed in the Kitty City strip club parking lot were minor, but Gayla’s voice rasped from a near-throttling. Her knees had been skinned, her wrist sprained. All minor injuries in a major-trauma world.

“Did you see or hear anything? Anyone?” Molina had asked.

Gayla’s red-blond frizz of a hairdo had thrashed back and forth on the pillow.

“No, ma’am,” she said, either reared in a household that taught children respect for their elders and authority figures…or that beat the hell out of them until everyone they met was a force to be reckoned with and kowtowed to.

“No, ma’am. If I’da seen something I’da screamed. You know? I just sort of slipped and my throat was all tight, and my elbows and knees burned and someone was leaning over me.”

“Someone. Tall, dark?”

Gayla frowned. Every night she saw faces on the other side of the spotlights, all blurred and all Someones. “Dark. The hair. Maybe.”

Maybe. Maybe Kinsella. Maybe…Nadir.

“Were the eyes dark, or light?”

“It was night.” Gayla finally sounded indignant enough to speak up for herself, for everything she missed really seeing as it was because life was nicer that way. “I couldn’t see eyes. I didn’t see face. Just something…dark coming at me and knocking everything out from under me. And breath. It was hot on my cheek.”

“Breath. Did you smell anything on it?”

“Wow. You know, when I was feeling sick there on the ground, it did seem my sense of smell kicked up. Like when you —”

“When you what?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. When?”

“During…it.”

“Oh. That.” Molina sighed. “So what was the smell in the parking lot?”

“What? I wasn’t doing…it.”

“The attacker’s breath. What did it smell like?”