Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

THE BLUE DAHLIA.

The words were etched like acid on the black-velvet Las Vegas night: on the classic, cursive, lurid neon sign that made every bar in every podunk town across the country a little Las Vegas for the evening.

If Matt loved anything about Las Vegas, it was its neon. And the Blue Dahlia owned the epitome of the art form: a lush magenta blossom arching over the cool blue words like an orchid corsage from a long-ago prom, a 1940s prom, when girls wore shoulder pads and their hair rolled high at the sides to match, and guys wore fedoras and boutonnieres.

The parking lot asphalt should have been rained into patent-leather slickness to complete the film noir setting, but this was Las Vegas, the desert Disneyland. The best it could do for any atmosphere was ersatz everything.

Matt parked the Hesketh Vampire near but not under one of the glaring security lights. He hadn’t ridden the motorcycle in weeks, but he wanted any pursuer to dismiss this as a solitary outing. A man on a motorcycle traveled solo. Miss Kitty had shown a disconcerting interest in anyone he might pair up with.

Inside, the hostess, a wispy nineteen-year-old, mounted on those clunky Minnie Mouse platform shoes they all wore nowadays, showed him to a small round table for one. His chair faced the token parquet dance floor in front of the tiny stage. A trio as classic as a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou occupied the tiny stage: a bassist, a saxophonist, and an electric keyboarder.

The music broadcast the relaxed yet jazzy insistence of updated Bach by Louis Armstrong. Be-Bach. You could let it be background Muzak, or get lost in the fascinating rhythms.

Matt used the oversize menu as a cover to study who was already there. He ordered a scotch on the rocks while he apparently dithered over the menu. His watch read 8:45 P.M.

No one had come in after him and only a scattering of customers littered the tables on a weeknight.

The quiet made him edgy. Expecting someone dangerous was more nerve-wracking than seeing him — her. It wasn’t Molina’s entrance that was the question mark but whether Miss Kitty would show up. And she might not look exactly as she had the last time he had seen her. He’d hope not! She’d worn motorcycle leathers then, like a punk London messenger boy. Before that…he’d always remember the day he’d first seen her at the Circle Ritz poolside, immaculate in a green silk pantsuit that matched her eyes, her Snow White coloring as startling as a billboard of a chorus girl in its high-colored photogenic perfection.

A new instrument was harmonizing with the trio, meaningless syllables riffing up and down the scale in inspired improvisation.

Matt shot a look at the stage. She was there now. Appeared from nowhere like a musical magician. Carmen. In the soft single spotlight, a portable mike in hand, she wore her draping long black velvet gown like a ’30s socialite in a Marx Brothers movie, a flash of bare arm through the shoulder slits the only pale spot on her figure besides her face in its dark helmet of hair.

Oddly enough, Matt found the feminine side of Molina more intimidating than the plain-Jane facade she wore on the job. She was a big woman, just shy of six feet, and there was nothing delicate about her bones or her blandly practical manner and manner of dress. But here she donned some of that ’40s dame toughness, even as her voice toyed with and tortured the rainy day lyrics and throaty sounds of Gershwin.

Matt could guess why she kept her songtress side under wraps. A singer sells raw emotion and that can make a performer seem vulnerable, especially throbbing out the torch songs Carmen was born to croon.

Matt didn’t see vulnerability as a weakness, but as a strength. Being human made it possible to rise above human fears. Molina was one of the few people in the world he felt was competent to handle anything, whatever she called herself, or whatever she wore. And despite the words of woe she sang so eloquently.

So he relaxed more deeply at the Blue Dahlia than he had allowed himself to do for days. When the waiter returned he ordered the sirloin tips in béarnaise sauce, a baked potato, as if he was actually going to enjoy this excuse for a secret meeting.

And he did. Everything had arrived and been savored by the time Carmen’s set ended at ten o’clock.

Matt studied the tables. Ebbing diners had been replaced by ranks of drinkers, who chattered now that the music was instrumental again.

No one who could have been Kathleen O’Connor in disguise or out of it remained in the room.

Matt left cash in the padded leather bill holder, got up, and followed Carmen’s exit through a narrow green velvet curtain spotted with fingerprints.

The short hall beyond led past a cigarette machine and the restrooms to a couple of closed doors. It smelled of cooking oil and spilled Coca-Cola.

Matt knocked softly at each door. The second produced a muffled “Come in.”

The room beyond wasn’t large but the huge circular mirror on a vintage dressing table reflected almost his full figure in the doorway.

He looked out of place in his khakis and lightweight navy nylon jacket. No fedora. No striped suit. No red carnation in his button hole.

Molina wasn’t sitting at the table but leaned against one of the pillars of drawers on either side.

“I’m going to kill you,” she announced.

“Not you, too.”

“My threat is serious. Do you know what you’ve done? My voice is creaky, the range is shaky. I can’t believe that a few weeks off could work such ruin.”

“You sounded great. Very Barbara Stanwick.”

“Yeah, thanks. She didn’t sing.” Molina shook her head. Her no-fuss bob wasn’t quite in period but somehow seemed to match the shabby nightclub ambiance. She pulled the blue silk dahlia from the side of her hair. It contrasted dramatically with the only visible makeup she wore, a dark-lipsticked ’40s mouth, but a moment later it lay on the pedestal like a crumpled blue tissue, frail and expendable looking, like a dead stripper.

Matt knew that the recent unsolved death of just such a blossom in the dust was gnawing at Molina’s professional and personal life.

“Odd,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ve both got similar problems.”

She arched her dark eyebrows that Temple always fussed could use a plucking. Matt saw them as a strong frame for the remarkable blue-zdahlia eyes that were her most memorable feature, as coolly hot as neon.

“You’ve got a killer who just barely eludes you,” Matt explained, “and I’ve got a killer I can’t quite manage to elude.”

“So what’s your nemesis up to now?”

“A nemesis is an avenger seeking justice. Kitty O’Connor isn’t that. She doesn’t even know me. She’s a…persecutor.”

“What’s she done now?” Molina looked like she should be lighting an unfiltered cigarette, but she wasn’t.

“She showed up where I work.”

“The radio station.”

“Yeah. I was leaving for the night, the morning, actually. About one-thirty, with my producer. And this figure came racing in on a Kawasaki Ninja, leather-wrapped from neck to toe. She charged us like a bull on that cycle, tore a necklace right off Letitia’s neck, then went roaring off flourishing it as a trophy.”

“Intimidation.”

“I know what it was. I want to know how to stop it.”

“What did you do then?”

“Tried to keep between her and Letitia. Tried to grab a handlebar and tip the cycle over. Not much that worked.”

“She’s just harassing you at this point, not doing any real damage.”

“She did real damage her first time out.”

Molina glanced at his side. Matt could feel the scar, the tightness, if he thought about it. He felt it when he made any major move. A razor slash, now a faint long, thin, white line, like a wound just before the blood wells to the surface and overflows.