Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

His caustic glance ricocheted off the ring on her finger. His anger had nothing to do with her or the ring, Temple realized, but everything to do with the Tiffany ring kept in a sandwich baggie at the LVMPD, as everybody now knew.

“You know how I encountered that sad young stripper, Cher Smith, the night before she was murdered. Strangled in a parking lot at another strip club, Baby Doll’s, the ‘new’ venue I’d advised her to find?”

Temple nodded. “Another Sean to avenge.”

Max ignored her parallel. He would neither deny nor defend his obsessions. Being a magician from an early age had sealed that fate.

“Molina put me there. In that strip club, on a collision course with Cher Smith. That one move also made me the last person known to have seen Cher Smith alive.”

“Molina? How?”

“I was working for her.”

“No way!”

“Yes. She had a personal problem. Wanted me to check out a certain guy. Can you guess who?”

It didn’t take Temple long to remember the uncharacteristic fear in Max’s eyes at the Rancho Exotica, his strange insistence that the ranch guard leave the scene of attempted murder before Molina and the police arrived.

“Rafi Nadir,” she guessed. “That creep who just had to lift me out of the Jeep as if I were a southern belle. I thought you’d strangle him. And then, later, you protected him, I never did understand why.”

“Understand now.” Max’s voice grew so deep and intense Temple had to lean inward to hear it. “I wasn’t protecting Nadir. I was protecting Molina. And I hated every second of it.”

“You? Protecting Molina?”

“She wanted me to keep an eye on this Nadir guy. That’s what got me into the strip clubs, where he worked as a bouncer. That’s how I met Cher Smith. He was hassling her in the parking lot and I stopped him.

“You know the rest. I took her home. Tried to tell her how to get away from Nadir at least, from stripping too. The next night she died in Baby Doll’s parking lot. Strangled.”

“Nadir, you think?”

He shrugged. “He’s a bully, likes to throw his weight around on women. He’s always on the strip club scene like an arsonist at a five-alarm fire. Trouble is, strip clubs were his scene.”

“Apparently hunt clubs are too.”

Max reached out to touch the small thin gold charm, a mere outline really. “Not so much hunt clubs, I think, as the Synth.”

“The Synth? He’s connected to the Synth?”

“He’s working as a bodyguard at a site I think the Synth is targeting.”

“What has all this to do with Molina, other than her asking you to keep tabs on a creepy guy?”

“The ‘creepy guy’ is the father of her child, and doesn’t know it.”

Temple opened her mouth. Closed it. Closed her eyes. Tried to picture this. Failed. Opened her eyes.

Max was regarding her with the ironic gaze he was famous for.

“And I thought my life is complicated,” she said, taking a swan dive into her martini.

An hour later the moon had vanished, but the carnival panorama of Las Vegas after dark more than made up for it.

Max had suggested they top off their excellent dinners with Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur instead of dessert.

Temple never disagreed with Max when his impulses matched her own.

During dinner they had discussed nothing more innocuous than the old days before chaos and crime has disrupted their Las Vegas unwed honeymoon. The change of subject had given Temple time to digest the new information on Molina and Nadir along with her sea bass.

“So why’d Molina ask you to track Nadir?” she said after savoring the first sip of Bailey’s, now braced to return to ugly realities.

“Two reasons: One, no one in the police department knows about him and she wants to keep it that way. Number two: he doesn’t know about Mariah, and she wants to keep it that way.”

“Why she’d have to do anything about him in the first place?”

“His description had been noted on routine police reports, I guess. It, uh, rang a a very big bell. Remember that time I took off for Los Angeles without much explanation?”

“Yes! You did.”

“I was checking out Nadir for Molina. To see if he was still in California. He was a former LAPD officer gone bad. And he wasn’t still in LA.”

“I don’t get it. She called on you for help. She’s your worst enemy. Well, maybe not your worst enemy, but your closest and most official. Why’d you do it?”

“Any opportunity to learn more about an enemy’s secrets and vulnerabilities is rarer than rubies. Her theory was that I was sneaky and crooked enough to scent out her sneaky, crooked ex–significant other. She was right.”

“Molina and Nadir? That’s like…Queen Victoria and Yasser Arafat.”

Max chuckled. “Thanks for painting another indelible picture. I thought so, too, but not nearly as imaginatively. I really don’t get it, but I’m convinced Molina is telling the truth this far: Nadir is Mariah’s father and she’d move all the neon in Las Vegas to keep either one of them from finding out.”

“So you helped her out. Why wouldn’t she ease up on you, then? Has the woman no gratitude?”

“None. And that’s a key element of human nature, Temple. If you learn somebody’s deepest, darkest secret, even at her own invitation, she eventually comes to fear and loathe you for having that edge, for having had to give it to you. Especially a hardnose like Molina, who thinks she can do it all alone.”

“Max, how did a veteran like you get caught in the middle like this?”

“I know. I should have rocketed like the Roadrunner away from all this. But after Cher Smith was killed, I couldn’t.”

“Shades of Sean,” Temple said soberly.

“Every senseless death is a shade of Sean.” Max swiveled to scan the night sky. Nothing outshone the constellations of Las Vegas. The sky was black and blank. Not even Ophiuchus could be seen, could anybody but they recognize it.

Temple didn’t know what to say. Scratch the surface on any part of Max and you always opened the scab of his cousin’s death.

So instead she tried to picture Molina and Nadir as a couple and mentally choked on the image. Like the fabled O. J. Simpson glove, it did not fit.

“I did say,” she mused, “when you asked me what I thought of Nadir, that he would appeal to a certain kind of woman.”

“Molina’s kind?” Max had whirled back.

“No. Not at all. But Mariah is what…twelve years old? Add almost a year for gestation. We’re talking a much younger Molina. Maybe dumber.”

“Nadir’s a bad enough guy that she doesn’t want him to come anywhere near Mariah. I wonder what the kid will make of this if she finds out later. But you see Molina’s problem. If she used official police avenues to check out Nadir she’d have a lot of explaining to do. Whys and wherefores. At that point, no strippers had been killed, at least not in the current sequence.”

“Hence you. She must have been desperate!”

“Thanks.” Max’s wry smile faded quickly. “When Cher Smith was killed, it brought everything to a head. I had witnessed Nadir threatening her, but I was the last man known to have any substantial contact with her. It doesn’t help that a few days ago I was undercover at a strip club when another girl was accosted in the parking lot. I came on Nadir kneeling beside her, and then Molina came on both of us. I recognized her despite the undercover drag but Nadir didn’t.”

“What did you do?”

“What she told me. She had a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pointed at my head. Nadir ran and she let him. I wanted to go after him, stop him, but she wouldn’t let me. You tell me what she was thinking. She made it pretty clear that she could forget she saw Nadir and ‘remember’ just me. She had me dial for assistance on her cell phone and then told me to get out of there.”