Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

“Tender I will leave to you. Reunion, yeah.”

“Follow me.”

This is not what I had in mind, but I have almost no choice. I am still trying to figure out what Miss Midnight Louise is doing on the premises when I find myself past all the monuments and tomb-stones and crypts and other gruesome but ornate set dressings.

I hear the tinkle of…a waterfall, I hope. Either that or the MGM Grand’s giant Leo the Lion statue is taking another untimely, three-story leak.

There are walkways of flat stones, bowers of exotic plants, patches of clipped thick Bermuda grass, sandy pits…this is either a really nice golf course, or it is —

A growl that sounds like marbles the size of basketballs being shaken together makes the ground vibrate.

I freeze.

“Do not worry,” Miss Louise purrs in that superior tone that makes me want to slap her whiskers off. “It is a friend of ours. Of mine, I should say.”

“You have earth tremors for friends?”

“Just Lucky , I guess,” she answers with a grin that would make the Cheshire Cat frrrrrow up.

We round an outcropping of canna lily leaves and come face to face with this large black dude with a mug the size of a beach ball.

Black panther, no doubt about it. Lean, mean, and counterculture, if domestication is the name of your game.

A huge black paw lifts and hangs over Miss Midnight Louise.

I gulp, then leap forward to knock her to safety.

The looming paw does not descend, but Miss Louise swipes me again on the rear.

“Ow! What was that for!”

“Conduct becoming a male chauvinist porcine. I do not need protection from Mr. Lucky. Do you not recognize Butch from the Rancho Exotica? He is the one who shared his dinner with poor Osiris, thanks to me.”

“Oh. Sorry, Mr. Butch. I mean, Mr. Lucky.”

The paw lowers and tickles my ears, and my back and my everything.

“Is this your poor old dad?” the black panther’s voice growls like thunder above me. “He was most valiant in your defense, although sadly ineffective.”

“That is my dad. He wants to see you for some reason. I am sure he will update me shortly.”

Well, what is a practical private eye to do? I am where I want to be, about to interview who I want to see. The only fly in the ointment is the odious Miss Louise, and telling her so would be highly self-destructive in present company.

So I do the right thing, ignore the chit, and get down to the chitchat with the Big Boys.

Saturday Night Stayin’ Alive

Women in strip clubs that catered to men either had business in being there, or no business at all in being there. Women with no business at all being there attracted attention, all of it either bigoted (“dyke!”) or unflattering (“frigid freak”).

Molina couldn’t afford attention and she couldn’t admit to her real business in being here at Saturday Night Fever — police business — so tonight she was a location scout for C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation.

It gave her a professional payback to name-drop the hit forensic science TV show that uses Las Vegas as a backdrop for its high-tech and personal look at maggots, body parts, and implausible police procedure.

Tonight, Molina was here on official business, and she was not alone.

Visibly alone, yes. Actually, no.

She glanced in the mirror behind the bar at Sergeant Barry Reichert, who usually did undercover drug detail. His dirt-biker ensemble and party-animal attitude fit right in at Saturday Night Fever.

At the moment he was stuffing ten-dollar bills in about six G-strings at a prodigious rate, all the time getting paid back in information that was worth hundreds.

Molina sipped her watered-down no-name whiskey and kicked back, despite the relentless overamped beat of music to strip by: loud, all bass, and brutally rhythmic.

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.”