Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“So are a lot of things that are kaput nowadays, like examining entrails.”

“As a matter of fact, several of our kind still seek signs in the entrails of birds. I speak of the hidden priestesses of the Raven Cult, for instance.”

Yuck! I say, eat ’em or leave ’em, but do not play with your food. These so-called “spiritual types” are the most bloodthirsty on the planet, if you ask me.

“So this Ophiuchus —?”

“Is the Sign of the Serpent Beaver.”

“Why is the constellation shaped like a house?”

“Louie, Louie. You have been corrupted by too much human contact. The constellation is not in the shape of a house but of a trap. The Serpent wraps around its victims, ensnares them in its coils. There is no escape.”

“This is just a bunch of hot gas jets in the sky, right? Not even the newspaper astrologists remember its name. That is fifteen minutes of fame minus fifteen in my book. Face it. Ophiuchus is the last millennium’s teen sensation. History. Forgotten history.”

“You are asking about it.”

“That is because I have weird friends.”

“The stars are eternal.”

“Not according to the latest wrinkle in the Big Bang theory. I watch the Discovery Channel.”

“I channel discovery.”

“My mama is bigger than your mama.”

“I do not think so. My mama is a snow leopard.”

“Mine is a…gangland leader.”

“A gangland leader? Surely you are not proud of that, Louie?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. This is the twenty-first century, Karma. Our kind need street smarts these days. Now, if you do not have any practical advice, I will be on my way.”

The news of my mama’s occupation appears to have tumbled Karma off her high horse. Or perhaps for her kind it is an elephant.

“I just wanted to warn you, Louie. The unseen planet of the hermaphrodite has entered the house of Ophiuchus, the Sign of the Serpent Beaver and thirteenth sign of the Invisible Zodiac. This is not a beneficent sign for you and yours.”

“Sure, sure,” I say, taking my leave.

In a minute I am down the palm tree trunk and into the foundation plantings.

I am in such haste to leave Karma and her dour rantings behind that I knock my noggin on the leg of an aluminum ladder some careless handy man has left standing.

A love tap on the brain-box does not slow Midnight Louie.

I dash through the parking lot, where my forefoot sends some round gold metal object spinning away like a Frisbee and crashing into a post.

Naturally, I cannot leave without investigating.

The object has split into two halves. My nose fills with a sickly sweet perfume as I accidentally inhale a cloud of fine dust.

Is this some druggie’s party kit? Have I taken a fatal dose of some disorienting, illegal, aphrodisiac hallucinogen?

Alas, no. It is merely a compact of ladies’ flea powder.

The rough journey, however, has shattered the mirror in the lid. I see my face reflected as in a microwave oven window, darkly, looking like a living jigsaw puzzle in the web of broken glass.

Who needs to linger in front of an unflattering reflection, other than a masochist?

I am quickly on my way again, leaving Karma’s silly predictions and bad omens behind like the insubstantial fairy dust they are.

Stripped for Action

“You!” Lindy Lukas snorted, inhaling cigarette smoke and coughing it out again with her foggy-throated words. “Nobody’d believe you as a stripper, honey. You’re too damn short.”

“If you only knew how much I hate to hear that,” Temple said.

“That nobody’d believe you as a stripper?”

“That I’m too short. That is blatant heightism. Aren’t four-inch heels part of the uniform? I’m an expert on spikes.”

“So are volleyball players, and they’re not stripper material. You can’t grab just any old girl and turn her into a stripper. It takes talent.”

Temple gazed at the ladies doing their thing onstage at Les Girls. It was the only stripper-run place in Las Vegas, but that didn’t mean the classic bump and grind was dead here.

“I suppose I could do you up as a twelve-year-old,” Lindy said through her smoke-slitted eyes. “That appeals to some customers.”

“I am not doing Alice in Wonderland in a G-string. That is really sick.”

“If you have to play a role,” Lindy went on, “I’ll get you a metal ring of thongs and you can be a costume hustler. You’ve seen how that’s done, I guess.”

Temple nodded. Her one backstage experience with strip shows had included a G-string of murders. Strippers were perennial targets for the demented. In a way, she was glad that Lindy had ruled out the role of victim for her. With what was happening to girls in strip clubs in the last few weeks, Temple might be mistaken for a real candidate. And that’s not what she wanted, to play decoy. She wanted to play detective.

“Do you have any idea,” Temple asked, “who might have killed that one stripper and attacked another one in the club parking lots?”

“Lots of ideas. Too many. It’s my job to watch these guys, but it’s a hard call. These places attract hustlers. Some of them are customers, but not usually, or self-appointed ‘freelance’ photographers or serious loose cannons. See that guy over there, who looks like he just left the orgy set of Gladiator?”

Temple nodded at the apt description. The man was a kind of Hugh Hefner clone, old and stringy but surrounded by busty Barbie dolls wearing attire stringier than he was. His white hair was combed forward into a Roman fringe designed to camouflage a hairline that had receded like the Tiber in a drought.

“The perfect suspect,” Lindy went on. “Wants those girls young enough to be his granddaughters hanging off of him by the dozen. Spends mucho dollars keeping that harem around him every time he comes in.

“After all the money he spends on the pleasure of their public company, you can picture him waiting in the parking lot and assuming one of them could be persuaded in giving him the pleasure of her private company.”

“And would she?”

“We’re strippers, not hookers. If an individual girl feels sorry for the old coot, that’s up to her. But most of ’em can’t wait to get out of here. They have lives like everybody else, kids, and boyfriends, husbands.”

“So Caesar in his would-be salad days over there really isn’t a good suspect?”

“Could be, but I doubt it. He’s here to bask in the public attention.”

“You ever run into a guy called Rafi Nadir?”

“Raf, yeah sure.”

“You know him?”

“Well, he never worked for me as a bouncer, if that’s what you mean. But he used to come in as a customer.”

“Why didn’t he work for you? He seems to have been associated with several clubs.”

“That’s the advantage of us running our own place. I’ve been retired from stripping probably almost as long as you’ve been alive, but I’ve seen it all. Raf was okay as a customer, but give him a smidge of authority and he’d get carried away. It just went to his head. He’d get overaggressive with customers who were basically pussycats, boss the girls around like he was the manager or something. I never gave him the chance to go into overdrive here, and he was fine.”

“You’re saying he was a petty tyrant, all bluster.”

“Unless things went really wrong. That’s the trouble with a guy like Raf, you can mostly count on him to be sound and fury, but then that one time…all bets are off.”

“If somebody he’d been pushing around, a woman, got away and then he ran into her alone again, would he be dangerous then?”

“Like in an empty parking lot? You’re asking could he have killed that Smith girl. If the right ‘wrong’ chain of events came up, yeah. But ordinarily, no. That’s my take. I could be wrong.” Lindy lit another cigarette off the glowing butt of the last one.