Carole Douglas - Cat in a Midnight Choir

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 Ebbing diners had been replaced by ranks of drinkers, who chattered now that the music was instrumental again.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

“She seemed to be taking something out on your producer,” Molina said finally. “Showing off to you and hassling the lady.”

“Right. She doesn’t like me to associate with any females. That’s pretty clear.”

“What sort of female is your producer?”

Matt hesitated at the impossibility of summarizing Letitia. “Gorgeous black woman, maybe thirty, maybe three hundred pounds.”

“Three hundred pounds. And this psycho chick was jealous?”

“I don’t know if it’s jealousy exactly. It’s more like…possession. Yeah, I know that’s a form of jealousy, but Kitty O’Connor is more like a demon than a woman.”

“Whoa! You are spooked. She’s a sick chick with issues, that’s all. I am not in the demon-exorcizing business and I think you’d know better than that by now.”

Matt stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep the fists his frustration made from showing. “This O’Connor woman is a wasteland of spiritual desolation. You can’t reach her by any human means. So don’t call her a demon, although that works for me. Call her a psychopath.”

“She hasn’t done anything you could even get a restraining order for. You can’t prove the slash.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s what she might do to someone around me.”

“Listen, this town is teeming with dangerous types. You have no idea what you’re brushing up against as you amble down the Strip on a Friday night. If the police are doing their job, and we mostly are, you and the tourists will never know.”

Matt held his tongue for a while. It ached to pour out the strangehistory of Kitty O’Connor. If he could only tell Molina about her connection to Max Kinsella…. But Molina bared her teeth like a Rottweiler when any scent of Kinsella tainted the air. And those confidences weren’t Matt’s to share. Though he wasn’t still a priest, he was used to keeping the seal of the confessional, to keeping everybody’s secrets in their individual, sacrosanct boxes, like little coffins containing rotting lilies left over from the thousand natural wakes a human being holds for all past sins and uncertainties.

All he could say was, “I know she was fanatically involved in the IRA. She would seduce wealthy men for money to buy weapons. I imagine she was downsized from her job during the recent seesaw of peace accords. I’d guess she’s an unemployed terrorist looking for a victim.”